


Persistent and Aggravated Imbecility

by Waldo



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Domestic, Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 14:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waldo/pseuds/Waldo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is afraid John is leaving.  John is leaving... a note.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persistent and Aggravated Imbecility

**Author's Note:**

  * For [justhuman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justhuman/gifts).



 Sherlock awoke to a room that was far too empty.  For the past three months, as long as neither of them were off on a case or handling the demands of siblings they’d just as soon deal with by text, he’d been sharing his bed with John.

 

At first he had been a little hesitant over the whole literal ‘sleeping together’ thing.  He’d never done it before; certainly not since Mycroft had been old enough to go off to school and hadn’t been there to come in and deal with his occasional childhood nightmares.  But surprisingly, it had taken less than a week for them to find ways to avoid kicking each other and for Sherlock to quit hogging the blankets.

 

There’d been the nine nights John had slept in his own room after Baskerville.  Sherlock still wasn’t sure if John had gone upstairs as a punishment for him for having drugged and experimented on him or if John had thought he was sparing Sherlock from the surge in his nightmares and the insomnia that followed.  He still wondered if he should tell John that if that last had been his plan, it hadn’t worked.  Sherlock had jolted awake every time John had and he had lain in bed wondering if he should go up and try to do something to fix the damage he’d caused or if he was just as likely to compound the issue.  Interpersonal relationships had never been his strength.  Up until very recently he hadn’t cared, but now he was starting to regret having never really paid attention to how people who’d had a falling out patched things up and got back to being… whatever it was he and John had been ‘being’.

 

Before he was able to decide John had just shown up at a little past three one morning and crawled back in with Sherlock without a word.  Sherlock hadn’t dared to make John think twice by saying something stupid, so he’d stayed silent too.  The next night things were back to normal.  Or what passed for normal at 221B Baker Street.

 

For the past several months, things had been good, but recently there had been an underlying layer of tension between them that Sherlock was all too familiar with.

 

He’d been hoping this one would last longer than a year and a half.  He knew he was doing well when they’d made it as flatmates for more than a year, and there’d been a little voice in the back of his head that sounded annoyingly like his brother’s that had told him that the only reason any of the others lasted that long was that their name had been on the rental contract and they’d had to ride out the remainder of the term without killing him.

 

But he knew what the sighs from the kitchen and the barely suppressed screams from the bathroom (a nearly full human skin hanging from the shower curtain, drying, that Sherlock had forgotten to mention) meant. John was reaching the end of his patience.

 

It was only seven now and he didn’t have a case going, but Sherlock rolled out of bed and threw on his dressing gown.  He needed tea.  He and John had had a pretty spectacular row the night before which had led to John storming out, the door slamming so hard that the skull picture on the wall had tilted, nearly falling on the floor.

 

Sherlock felt ridiculous at the level of apprehension he felt as he opened the door to his own bedroom, but he was truly prepared to find John’s suitcase near the front door.

 

He cast a wary eye around, and when he didn’t find any luggage, he sighed to himself and went in to put on the tea.

 

He had the kettle on to boil and was pulling the milk out of the refrigerator when he noticed the letter stuck to the freezer with a magnet.  So this was it, he thought. His own ‘Dear John’ from John.

 

 

_Sherlock,_

_This is getting ridiculous.  We have got to set some ground rules.  Most flatmates do it before they move in, or at least shortly thereafter.  We never got around to it, and it’s gotten to be long past time.  If you think any of these are truly asking too much, we can discuss it when I get up in the morning._

Sherlock raised an eyebrow.  He admitted to himself that when he hadn’t seen a suitcase by the stairs, the next thought he’d had was that John hadn’t even come home.

 

_1._ _Within the week you will buy a small refrigerator for your experiments.  Feet and feta do not belong in the same cheese drawer._

_2._ _If you eat off it, drink out of it, use it to cook, or put eyeballs in it, YOU are in charge of cleaning it.  With hot water and soap.  Possibly sterilizing it wouldn’t be a bad plan either._

_3._ _You will label any mold you are growing on purpose.  It really wasn’t my fault that I thought those month-old strawberries were garbage. (See #1 to avoid further confusion on this point.)_

_4._ _There is a notebook under your microscope.  You will log your experiments in it so that I know what you’re using all these things for and how long you plan to need to keep them.  And know that if you don’t get rid of the eyeballs, the carton of mealworms marinating in alcohol or last week’s Chinese take-away when the book says you’re done with it, I WILL.  So keep the damn thing up to date if you have to extend an experiment._

_5._ _Your underwear are your problem._

Sherlock blinked at what seemed to be such a wild non sequitur after all the rules about his experiments.

 

_5._ _Your underwear are your problem. I don’t mind dropping off the dry cleaning if I’m going anyway, but if you put your damn pants or socks in my laundry basket again, I am putting them in the bin._

_6._ _My gun is not a toy.  I don’t give a rat’s arse how bored you are.  Find something else to play with._

_7._ _You are responsible for dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Unless we’re on a case.  Then I’m lucky if I can force feed you toast and tea in the mornings.  I won’t be ridiculous and expect you to cook when you can’t even bother to eat.  I don’t care if you cook or get take away, but I expect hot food that I can recognize at a reasonable hour those three nights, provided by you.  I’ll take care of the other four._

_8._ _If I can’t get it at Tesco’s, you’re on your own to get it.  Stop adding Petri dish gel and ‘seventeen different species of beetles; live’ to my market list.  And you’re especially not allowed to bitch when I won’t go out of my way to chase down whatever the hell you think you need.  Where did you think I would even **find** seventeen kinds of beetles anyway?_

_9._ _You own a laptop of your own.  It’s two years newer than mine and probably twice as fast.  There is no earthly reason for you to need to use mine.  Should a reason arise, ASK ME FIRST.  And no, ‘my computer is more than six steps away and yours is right here on the table’ is not a sufficient excuse for you to close all my tabs, snoop in my email, or look up things you don’t want your brother finding out about.  Besides, do you really think that if he’s monitoring your computer he’s above monitoring mine as well?_

_10._ _If you bring live animals into the house, they are your problem.  Feed them, clean up after them and chase them down if/when they get out or I’ll call the RSPCA to take care of them for you.  And if you lose another flying mammal in the flat, I get to make as many bat-man jokes as I want without you going into another four-day sulk._

_11._ _I reserve the right to add to this list as the need arises._

_12._ _If I’m doing something that’s pissing you off, I expect you to tell me about it. As civilly as you can manage, please, though I’m well aware of who I’m dealing with, so we’ll give the definition of ‘civil’ some latitude._

Sherlock finished reading and then, even though he was nearly completely eidetic, he put the rules back on the refrigerator with the same magnet John had used.  He supposed John had a point. Or a dozen. 

 

When the tea water was seconds away from boiling he switched off the kettle.  No point in waking John and incurring any more wrath than he’d had flung at him lately. Sherlock puttered around making his tea and then grabbed a banana out of the basket of fruit on the work surface.  He wandered over to the sofa and grabbed his laptop from the end table.  John’s wasn’t on his chair or on the table.  Sherlock wondered if John had just gotten generally annoyed with him using his laptop because it was there or if it was the seven tabs of crime scene photos of bear maulings and horse tramplings that Sherlock had left up that had been the last straw, resulting in John keeping his laptop close to hand at all times now.

 

Sherlock set his tea on the floor near him and began surfing for compact laboratory grade cooling systems.  If John was going to insist that he get a separate unit for his experiments, he might as well get a good one.  Henry Knight had paid them quite well for exposing his ‘hound’, after all.  Those little brown boxes kids kept in their halls at uni for left over curry and milk for their tea were crap. 

 

He had tabs for no less than thirteen different models that would do in a pinch, but didn’t meet his exact expectations when John came down the stairs.  Sherlock raised an eyebrow at how quickly John was moving, noting that he was completely dressed, shoes and all.

 

That didn’t bode well.  They both had a tendency to putter in their pyjamas and dressing gowns for a few hours after they woke, when there was nothing on the schedule to force them to get dressed any earlier.  John was leaving right away.  Sherlock scowled, wondering if there was anything he should be saying.  It was an odd feeling, giving a damn if he’d upset someone.  He found himself wanting to fix it, but having never given a damn before he had no repertoire from which to pull a strategy.

 

John stopped short before reaching the last stair.  “Oh, you’re up.”

 

“Obviously,” Sherlock answered before realizing that that was likely not one of the answers someone like John would have in his armory for dispensing with uncomfortable situations.  He scowled again, trying to think of a way to back-pedal.

 

“Alright.  Good,” John said, apparently not thinking too much about Sherlock’s customary, rude reply.  “I didn’t figure you’d be up yet… is there a case?”  John seemed genuinely confused about something as simple as Sherlock being awake.

 

“Not as such, though a I am looking for something,” Sherlock said, poking at the laptop again, but most of his attention still on John.

 

John finished descending the stairs and grabbed his green jacket from where he’d apparently tossed it when he’d come in the night before.  “What are you looking for?”

 

“A cold storage unit,” Sherlock said, hating for all the world that he actually sounded a bit _timid_.  He was quite certain he’d never been timid in all his life.  Yet here he was speaking quietly, even mouse-ishly, trying to keep John from continuing the previous night’s argument.

 

John nodded, pausing in his preparing to leave.  “You found my note.”

 

Sherlock nodded, not saying anything because he’d determined that saying ‘obviously’ again wasn’t in his best interest.

 

“Look, can we talk about it when I get home?  I just got a call from Molly.  There’s been a collapse of a construction site near Bart’s.  They need everybody they can get on hand.  I should be back before dinner.”

 

Sherlock looked straight at John now, the laptop forgotten.  “Do they know what caused the collapse?  Do they suspect foul play?”

 

John smiled and Sherlock felt some of the tension he’d woken with melt away.  “I didn’t ask.  But I’m sure if you called Lestrade, he’d let you know if it was worth your time to go poking about out there.  But, really, I have to go.  They’ll have finished triage by now and be looking to get anyone who needs it into surgery.” 

 

John crossed over to the sofa and leaned down and gave Sherlock a quick kiss before heading for the front door.

 

“You’re coming back, though, right?” Sherlock heard himself ask before he could censor himself.

 

John froze, hand on the doorknob.  “Of course.  When things clear up in the A and E.  I’ll call if it looks like it’ll be past seven, alright?” 

 

John was still giving him a strange look, which made Sherlock feel like he still wasn’t getting right.  “Right, right of course,” Sherlock mumbled going back to his laptop.

 

John shook his head as he left, pulling the door shut behind him.  Sherlock hoped that expression he’d left with was one of fond exasperation – he’d seen that on John’s face a million times – and not ‘placate the moron’, which was what Sherlock usually meant when that look was on his own face.

 

•••••

 

In the end Lestrade had called Sherlock twenty minutes after John had left and Sherlock had gone down to the construction site.  He’d surveyed the damage (two dead, twenty-six injured and a sixteen-storey building frame made from iron beams completely toppled) and spoken to the site engineer as well as seven of the unscathed workers before going with Lestrade to start digging into who would want to ruin the project and been willing to do it at the expense of human lives.  It had been half-four when they’d figured out it had been the developer himself who was having financial problems and was counting on the ‘high rise crane accident’ to be covered by the insurance.

 

He’d left Lestrade to go through the mundanities of actually arresting the idiot while he headed home.  As he walked, his phone buzzed.  Text from John.

 

                        ONE MORE MINOR SURGERY THEN HOME.  BEST GUESS 7:00.  MAYBE HALF SEVEN.

 

Sherlock stopped, leaning against a light post as he replied.

 

                        THE DEVELOPER DID IT FOR THE INSURANCE MONEY.  VERY BORING. 

 

He looked up as someone passed too closely.  The sign on the building across the pavement caught his eye and he remembered all at once that it was Wednesday.

 

THE DEVELOPER DID IT FOR THE INSURANCE MONEY.  VERY BORING.  I’M PICKING UP CURRY FOR DINNER.  IT’S WEDNESDAY.  DO YOU WANT SAMOSAS? – SH

 

 

There was a long pause and Sherlock wondered if John had already started scrubbing for his last surgery, but after a few more seconds his phone buzzed again.

 

            I’M STARTING TO THINK I SHOULD HAVE LEFT YOU THAT LIST MONTHS AGO.  WOULD HAVE SAVED US HOURS OF STUPID ARGUMENTS.

 

Followed almost immediately by

 

            OH, AND YES.  THANK YOU FOR ASKING.

 

Sherlock felt distinctly annoyed by the fact that he felt a more than a little pleased with himself for doing the right thing by John.  Doing things John had figured out for them both would make things easier between them.

 

He went in and placed their order, sitting in one of the chairs by the door while he waited for them to prepare it.

 

Now that the building collapse was solved he was free to start turning over this new twist between him and John.  From the beginning he’d not objected to John telling him when his behavior was less-than-socially-acceptable.  And for the first time since early in his childhood, he’d found himself taking mental notes about what he’d done and under what circumstances and then tried, when there weren’t more pressing things on his mind – like a murder, a robbery or some kind of espionage – to not repeat the kinds of things John had told him were ‘not good’.

 

It wasn’t like others hadn’t tried to change the way he interacted with the world.  His mother, his father, several of his teachers…  Most recently his brother, and on occasion Lestrade.  He’d pretty universally told all of them to fuck off and carried on the way he wanted to.

 

John had always been different. 

 

Sherlock was still pondering the situation while he paid for their dinner and he caught a taxi back to Baker Street.

 

Once home he set the take away on the few clear inches on the table in the kitchen, tossing a tea towel over it to keep it a bit warmer until John got home – though unless John was far earlier than he’d anticipated, they’d have to warm it anyway.

 

He took the list of rules off the freezer again and brought them back into the living room.  He took off his overcoat and jacket and kicked off his shoes before collapsing onto the sofa, his head on the throw pillow, his feet on the opposite arm.

 

He scanned the rules again, still pondering why he not only was willing to let John tell him what to do, but why he almost felt relieved that John had finally done so.  It was a very disconcerting feeling.

 

He’d ascribe it to ‘love’, but he still wasn’t completely sure that what he felt for John _was_ love.  People with more facility with emotions than he had often remarked that they couldn’t put a qualifying definition on something as intangible as love, so he was pretty sure he’d never feel qualified to do so.  So if he couldn’t decide when exactly feelings of friendship and companionship and attractiveness crossed into the area of ‘love’, he’d never be completely able to ascribe his motivations to something so ephemeral.

 

Yet he still _worried_ when he’d believed John ready to give up on him.  He was still feeling a little giddy when he thought about the fact that John would be pleased that he’d gotten dinner – that he’d clearly been pleased that he’d bothered to ask if John wanted samosas with his curry.

 

Sherlock lay the paper on his chest and steepled his fingers.  All these conflating emotions were damn annoying.  He was frustrated with the fact that he was pleased that John would be pleased?  That didn’t make sense.  No wonder he’d ignored emotion and emotional complications in his life.  Emotions were… inconvenient _at best_.

 

He didn’t actually need the paper in order to review what John had written.  His mental image of the letter kept scrolling to rule five.

 

_5._ _You are responsible for dinner on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Unless we’re on a case.  Then I’m lucky if I can force feed you toast and tea in the mornings.  I won’t be ridiculous and expect you to cook when you can’t even bother to eat.  I don’t care if you fix something or get take away, but I expect hot food that I can recognize at a reasonable hour those three nights, provided by you.  I’ll take care of the other four._

 

He read it to himself several times wondering what was significant about it.  It wasn’t just that it wasn’t about his experiments (which, Sherlock was slowly admitting to himself, was the cause of about half of their arguments – his lack of social conventions seemed to be the spark for the other half, he supposed.)  After all there was a rule about his underwear and he didn’t find that terribly significant other than the fact that he’d have to actually learn how to get the cranky old washing machine to work without overflowing (as he’d done the last three times, which had led to him sneaking his socks and things into John’s wash, since that would leave him far less vulnerable than actually asking why he couldn’t do something as simple as wash his underwear without causing a flood.)

 

After a minute he saw it.  It was the compromise implicit in the rule.  John thought Sherlock should be doing his fair share of the work when they were both eating.  But he was willing to concede that there would be times when Sherlock wasn’t eating and John didn’t feel the need to change that about him. 

 

Since that first Pink case, John had kept tabs on him, making sure he wasn’t about to have some sort of hypoglycemic incident while working, and he’d found subtle ways to get small bits of food into Sherlock when a case went on for days on end.  And Sherlock had found that without him noticing it, John had found a bit of perfect equilibrium for him.  He’d get Sherlock to eat just enough to avoid passing out (because that would certainly waste valuable minutes he could be spending on the case), but not so much that Sherlock was wasting precious energy on digestion.

 

For most of his life people had wanted to change him.  Oh, sure, he was handy to have around when someone’s murder needed solving or kidnapping needed sorting or stolen article needed found, but few people actually wanted to _be_ with him.

 

John had accepted his acerbic nature from the beginning. 

 

He wondered if it wasn’t something of an oxymoron that Sherlock realized that what John wanted was to make him a better person whist also not changing him.

 

Perhaps it was a matter of degrees.

 

And maybe that was why his feelings for John – whatever poets and novelists and song-writers might call them – ran so deeply.  Most people assumed he was a lost cause, that he couldn’t change, even in small ways, so they’d never asked him to.  Either that or they’d decided if he wouldn’t change in large ways, he wasn’t worth the effort, so they hadn’t tried.

 

Possibly they had, but in more subtle ways.  Ways too subtle for him to truly understand.  John understood him well enough to know that direct was better.  It left far, far less room for confusion or misunderstanding.  He’d known him well enough to know that someone who didn’t worry about offending others wasn’t easily offended.  By spelling things out, they would have fewer arguments. 

 

Sherlock mentally acknowledged his habit of pushing limits until someone pushed back.  Most people pushed back by walking away.

 

John pushed back by pointing to the line Sherlock was _about_ to step over and letting him know that it might be best to stay where he was.

 

But the decision to do so was always Sherlock’s.

 

John would get mad when Sherlock did something John disapproved of, but he never tried to actually control him.  To _force_ him to stay on his side of the line.  And he eventually got over it when Sherlock steam-rolled right over it before John could get there and point it out.

 

He was still thinking about it, still trying to make sense of such irrational things like emotions when he heard John’s key in the door.  His heart skipped a beat and he had just a moment of mental whiplash when he realized how absolutely certain he’d been not twelve hours before that John was preparing to walk out that door and never come back through it.  And now he knew that John was not only planning to stay, but he was willing to work to keep things good between himself and Sherlock.

 

Sherlock smiled as John came in and collapsed into his chair.  John looked tired and irritated.  “I got dinner.”

 

At that point Sherlock’s only regret was that it had taken him that long to figure out what it took to get that smile on John’s face more often.

 

**Author's Note:**

> “It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.” ― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things


End file.
